Edith Wharton - THE BIOGRAPHY
Uploaded by magicninja on Dec 22, 2004
Edith Wharton - THE BIOGRAPHY
Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862 under the name Edith Newbold Jones. She was born in New York, the great state. Her parents were George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Rhinelander, who were descendants of Dutch and English colonists who made fortunes in shipping, banking, and real estate. Georges parents were not happy with the marriage of Lucretia and George, they said that Lucretia was of a bad breed, but that didn't stop them.
Edith constantly traveled back and forth to Europe, Rome and Paris. While living in Paris, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and they had moved to a German watering called Bad Wildbad in the Black Forest. While being there she became very sick with typhoid. All doctors were in the war helping soldiers that no one could care for her. She eventually became well but was very delicate for about two yrs. Then she moved back to New York at the age of 10 on Twenty-third Street, near Fifth Avenue. She didn't attend school but was given home schooling and read from her father's library.
At age 23, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, nickname, Teddy. He was a nice man with good intellectual background. He was not that smart and didn't enjoy Edith's interests, which caused their marriage to be unhappy. Edith's father died due to many years of sickness. For a while Edith lived with her widowed mother.
Edith was a participant of fashionable society and an observer of changes in New York. Edith was an ideal person to view the social ambitions of the Gilded Age, which was the post-civil War period of American expansion in business, foreign affairs, and arts. She wrote "THE MOUNT" in 1902. She wrote the fiction, "THE HOUSE OF MIRTH" in 1905 where she depicts materialism and the rich of the contemporary world. She was extremely creative. She had problems publishing her first book and didn't get published until she was thirty-six years old.
She then settled in France, first in Paris. She had divorced Teddy in 1913. She spent most of her time with French writers and artists, Paul Bourget, Jacques-Emile Blanche. During WWI she became dedicated to the ALLIED cause. She created hostels and schools for refugees from northeastern France and Belgium.
In her last years, Edith spent in two beautiful...